Journal of Political Philosophy

One of the crucial questions that lawyers, philosophers, politicians, and journalists struggled with during the twentieth century was how to “guarantee that informative and accurate news would flow to the public through the press.”1 Traditional answers to this question assumed that the key to a well-informed citizenry lay within speech rights. The idea was that speech rights would create a rich flow of information from which diligent citizens could learn the important facts and form their own views about public issues. However, in digital democracies, speech rights are very well entrenched, yet many people are still largely uninformed. To be sure, ignorance is sometimes the result of negligence, but it is undeniable that citizens are often the victims of disinformation campaigns, fake news, and personalized online propaganda. These phenomena make it difficult to understand public issues even if one is disposed to do so. And, importantly, they seem to confirm what scholars like Lebovic himself—but also Lippmann or Habermas—have lamented: speech rights are not enough to guarantee that the public receives an adequate supply of news. The traditional answer to Lebovic's question is, then, at least partially incorrect. Drawing on these insights, this article shifts the focus from speech rights towards the rights of the public, and argues that, if we want to guarantee that an adequate supply of news reaches the public, we need to start taking more seriously the idea that citizens have a right to be well informed. As I will show, this idea repeatedly appears in journalism theory and practice, as well as in democratic and legal theory, but it remains a somewhat vague notion: it is not clear what it might mean, nor what its normative implications could be. This article aims to fill this conceptual gap by conceptualizing what I will call citizens' right to information (henceforth CRI). One motivation for theorizing CRI is to show that a positive right of the citizenry to be provided with quality news is—contrary to appearances—fully compatible with free speech and journalistic freedoms. The key here lies in conceiving this as a moral right which imposes moral—but not legal—obligations on journalists while, at the same time, compelling the state to foster quality journalism through adequate media policies. Seen in this light, CRI may become a useful landmark whose conceptual clarification could illuminate other discussions, such as journalism ethics. Indeed, it seems that journalists' special democratic rights and duties could hardly be explained without assuming something like CRI. Moreover, CRI might illuminate the discussion on what journalism can mean in our digital era—in which the line separating professional journalists from lay citizens is increasingly blurred—by linking the profession to an ethical commitment to provide citizens with the information they, as such, have a right to. Finally, the concept of CRI might also be useful to guide the discussion of alternative models for quality journalism, which has been recently sparked by the collapse of the traditional advertisement-based funding system. After all, such discussion—just as that of media policy, including Lebovic's question—could be seen as a debate on what is the best way to provide citizens the informational service they have a right to. Of course, all these discussions can be only superficially addressed here. But by connecting them to CRI, this article will offer a perspective to look at them afresh. The article is structured as follows. Section II lays the groundwork for a democratic right to be well informed, by reviewing previous appearances of this idea, and by contextualizing it within the map of communication rights. Section III offers a systematic framework for justifying and conceptualizing CRI. After showing four possible ways to justify this right, I proceed to spell out its four main characteristics. First, its function is to ensure that citizens are provided with a good informational service that enables them to become well informed and therefore competent political decision-makers. Second, and consequently, its right-holders are all those with participatory rights. Third, its content is not what people want to know, or any kind of information about politics, but specifically information that is useful for updating political knowledge (that is, democratically relevant information). Finally, its two main correlative duties apply, respectively, to journalists and to the state. These two last characteristics—the content and the correlative duties of CRI—are highly controversial: any complete answer to them requires committing to contested normative claims about democracy. My strategy for navigating these difficulties is to draw a distinction between the general concept of CRI and its different conceptions. The general concept, I contend, concerns the democratic, moral, and positive right of citizens to be offered democratically relevant information. As I will argue, accepting this general concept does not require endorsing any contested claims about democracy. It is only when we try to fine-tune the content or the correlative duties of CRI that we need to take sides on issues upon which disagreement abounds. Each one of these specific, but controversial, definitions of CRI constitutes one plausible conception of this right. This article, I have to say, will not identify—much less defend—any of these conceptions. Rather, its purpose is just to lay out an analytical framework for further discussion, about both the concept and the different conceptions of CRI. Despite being incomplete, this analysis will be enough to distinguish the right to be well informed from two other rights with which it is often confounded: freedom of information and the public's right to know. The idea that citizens have a right to receive democratically relevant information is well established in democratic societies. It repeatedly appears in journalism theory and practice, as well as in democratic and legal theory, albeit under different names. In this section, I first offer a brief overview of these appearances, which—despite using different nomenclature—share the intuition that citizens have a right to be well informed. I then locate this idea on the map of communication rights, defining it as a right of the public, rather than as a speech right. The field of journalism is where the idea of a citizens' right to information has had the most clear and persistent influence. Journalists often justify their more controversial activities, such as whistleblowing or intruding on individuals' privacy, by appealing to citizens' interest in being—or their right to be—well informed. Such journalistic practice is supported by most professional codes of ethics, which often present public service as the profession's main value. What is more, empirical research on journalists' self-perception shows that they usually think of themselves primarily as public servants who work for citizens, rather than for their actual employers, which are often private companies.2 Journalism theory echoes this idea. Scholars tend to agree that the profession's core element is its ethical commitment to informing citizens of what they need to know to become competent political decision-makers, rather than of what they are merely curious about, or have a private interest in knowing.3 As Elliot and Ozar point out, journalism is not usually conceived as serving mere audiences, but rather as providing a service to the entire political community: that is, to the collection of individuals who deal with public matters. Thus, unlike other professionals such as doctors or teachers, journalists are not committed to serving particular individuals or specific groups of people, but rather the citizenry at large.4 This explains why, according to most theorists, journalists ought to treat their audiences as citizens rather than as consumers. What is probably the most famous formulation of journalism's basic tenet was coined by Kovach and Rosenstiel, who claim: “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.”5 Often, this predominant view of journalism explicitly invokes the idea of a right, as when Pamela Taylor Jackson claims that “[j]ournalism represents a right to public interest news and information.”6 Legal scholars and rights theorists have also entertained the idea of a citizen's right to information. Sam Lebovic, for example, refers to “the right to the news” as the right we need to protect if we are to solve the problem of how to adequately inform the public.7 More recently, Rowan Cruft has appealed to a human right “to education, specifically about current matters of public interest”.8 Although his approach to this right is incidental (as he only invokes it in order to ground journalism as a human right in itself), Cruft makes clear that, for him, citizens have a right to be well informed. In fact, he claims that journalists' rights and duties “correlate with human rights to the provision of (good) journalism.”9 Before Lebovic and Cruft appealed respectively to the right to the news and to the right to good journalism, free speech theorist Owen Fiss defended what he calls the “democratic theory of the First Amendment”, which similarly appeals to “the public's right to know and to be informed”.10 Legal scholar Stephen Sedley, for his part, has lamented that despite juridical rhetoric appeals to the public's interests, free speech and free press practice often focuses exclusively on protecting communicators' interests. Along similar lines, Sedley holds that whenever something is worth knowing, the interested audience may have a right to receive such information, even if they are unaware of that information's existence.11 One might argue, then, that just as patients have a right to be informed by their doctor, citizens have a right to be informed by journalists. Note that in both cases the right-holders are unaware of what information they have a right to be provided with. Legal scholar Mark Bovens also invoked citizens' right to be well informed when he argued that twenty-first-century citizens need new information rights. Among these, what he calls “tertiary information rights” would regulate horizontal relations between citizens and other private entities, which might be required to disclose information of crucial importance for citizens qua citizens. That information, which “should remain reasonably accessible to each and every citizen,” may include things such as art collections, national events, sports, or cultural manifestations, but—importantly—also “news items”.12 Democratic theory has also long held the idea that citizens should be properly informed.13 Of course, democratic theorists disagree on the quantity and quality of citizens' informational needs.14 However, they agree that for democracy to work properly, citizens need to be provided with quality information about certain relevant issues. Jürgen Habermas and Robert Dahl, two champions of democratic theory, might be taken as illustrative examples of this point. In Habermas's deliberative conception of democracy, decisions are only legitimate if they are the result of a rational discussion through which citizens transform their “mere opinions” into “reflected public opinions”, or—as he calls them elsewhere—“considered public opinions”.15 For citizens to acquire these public opinions, Habermas argues, professional journalists should offer them the news, reports, and commentaries they need as citizens.16 As he puts it, “audiences are not only consumers, that is, market participants, but also citizens who have a right to partake in culture, to follow political events, and to be involved in the formation of political opinions.”17 These considerations lead Habermas both to criticize news media for wasting people's attention on irrelevant issues, and to defend interventionist media policies.18 In a similar vein, Dahl finds it unquestionable that, to be competent, citizens need political and social institutions that help them become so. For Dahl, “[o]pportunities to gain an enlightened understanding of public matters is not just part of the definition of democracy. They are a requirement for democracy”.19 Indeed, according to Dahl, one of the fundamental principles of democracy is precisely “enlightened understanding”, which states that “each member must have equal and effective opportunities for learning about the relevant alternative policies and their likely consequences”.20 Enlightened understanding would be satisfied, in principle, by three basic institutions of democracy: freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the existence of alternative sources of information.21 Dahl, however, is aware that these institutions, created during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, might no longer be an efficient way to promote enlightened understanding in the twenty-first century. “If this is so,” he adds, “then democratic countries will need to create new institutions to supplement the old ones.”22 Dahl here opens the door for deep structural reforms that would adapt our democracies to the specific challenges that our present century poses to relevant information-gathering processes. Remarkably, at the very beginning of the digital revolution, Dahl foresaw the need for new institutions to tackle what would eventually become known as “information disorder”: the huge amount of available information, much of which is indifferent or even detrimental to enlightened understanding.23 Given the increased availability of information, he contends, democratic countries must “improve citizens' capacities to engage intelligently in political life,” which would require enhancing old institutions with “new means for civic education, political participation, information, and deliberation.”24 The assumption that, in a democracy, citizens need to be well informed, leads both Dahl and Habermas to struggle with Lebovic's question about how to guarantee that informative and accurate news flows to the public. Neither of them gives a clear answer to this question, but both are keen to accept institutional reforms, precisely on the basis of what might be called citizens' right to be well informed. Indeed, regardless of whether they come from the field of journalism or from the theories of law, rights, or democracy, all previous reflections point towards a right of citizens to be offered the information they need to become well informed. This right is not always explicitly invoked, and when it is invoked, it receives different names—the “right to good journalism”, “right to the news”, or simply “right to information”. Behind this apparent diversity, however, there is a shared intuition: unless citizens are aided in their information-gathering processes, they will not be able to become well informed. And if that happens, the intuition goes, we cannot expect democracy to work well. As James Madison wrote, “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”25 Hence the belief that citizens must be offered the information they need to become well informed. It is not fully clear, though, what a democratic right to be well informed might mean or imply, for no sufficiently systematic analysis of this right has yet been carried out. However, previous appearances of this idea offer illuminating insights. For instance, by affirming that democracy cannot work well unless citizens are offered quality news, they point towards its grounds. When they suggest that the information that matters is not what one might want to know, but what one, as a citizen, needs to know, they offer a crucial hint about its content. Similarly, when authors like Cruft, Dahl, or Habermas identify plausible implications that might follow from this right, they offer clues about which duties might correlate to it. In the remainder of this article, I will draw from these insights, and I will lay out a systematic framework for both justifying and analyzing this right, which I will call citizens' right to information (CRI). My first step will be to locate CRI on the map of communication rights. To make sense of the right to be well informed, the first step is to understand its place in what Emerson calls the “whole system of freedom of expression”: that is, the set of rights that regulate the exchange of information, opinions, and ideas.26 According to Emerson, this system includes two sides: the right to communicate and the right to know, each of which encompasses several further rights.27 Inspired by Emerson, but departing from his terminology, here I propose to classify communication rights into the following two categories, each defined by the role the right-holder plays in the communication process. The first category of communication rights consists of speech rights. These are rights whose right-holders are conceived as the emitters of information, opinions, and ideas—that is, those who send or transmit most of the content in the communication regulated by the right. Among these rights, we may include rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to communicate. The second category of communication rights consists of rights of the public. These are rights whose right-holders are conceived as the addressees of content—that is, the audience or the public who receives the information, opinions, or ideas. It is this latter category to which CRI belongs, and on which I will therefore focus.28 To better illustrate the distinctiveness of CRI, let me first briefly present the two best-known rights of the public, which will serve as points of comparison. The first of these rights is freedom of information (FOI). Strictly speaking, FOI is not a freedom, but rather a claim-right to access documents and information held by public institutions. Its name is owed to the influential US Freedom of Information Act, which since 1966 has inspired legislation on institutional transparency around the world.29 The other best-known right of the public is the public's right to know (PRK). This right is often conceived as a general and unqualified entitlement to information that is of interest to the right-holder. It includes, as Emerson puts it, “[f]irst, the right to read, to listen, to see, and to otherwise receive communications; and second, the right to obtain information as a basis for transmitting ideas or facts to others”.30 The fact that the public's right to know is of such a “seemingly unlimited nature”31 might explain the pervasive disagreements about what this right might actually mean; Maciejewski and Ozar, for instance, have identified twelve different interpretations.32 To simplify things, I will distinguish only two different, but interconnected, meanings usually attributed—often without sufficient explanation—to the phrase “the public's right to know”. In its wide sense, “the public's right to know” is used for the whole category of rights of the public, and might thus be taken as referring to a principle or a very general right encompassing all the other more specific rights of the public. When used in this wide sense, “the public's right to know” is often indistinctly employed to also name specific rights of the public within it, such as FOI or, as we saw in Section II.I CRI, which are conceived as specific instances of it.33 To avoid possible misunderstandings deriving from this usage, in the following I will refrain from using the term in this wide sense. Instead, I will use “rights of the public” to name the set of rights whose right-holders are conceived as an audience. I will speak of the public's right to know (PRK) only in the narrow sense of the term. In this sense, the PRK is the entitlement to search, access, and receive the information needed to develop and exercise one's conception of the good. In this narrow sense, the PRK is just one specific right of the public among others, such as FOI and CRI. Even so, the PRK remains—even in this narrow sense—rather a wide right, at least in comparison to other rights of the public. This will become clearer when I address the question of content. So far, I have reviewed previous appearances of the idea of a democratic right to be well informed. I have also identified the side of the system of communication rights where it belongs, alongside other rights of the public such as FOI and the PRK. However, this is still insufficient for clarifying what a democratic right to be well informed could actually mean. In the following section, I will take the first steps towards such a clarification. Against the backdrop of the previous section, in the remainder of this article I will put forward a systematic framework for both justifying and analyzing CRI. This framework comprises five features: grounds, function, right-holders, content, and correlative duties. In spelling out these traits, I will compare CRI to other communication rights, which will help not only to better clarify it, but also to shed light on its difference from these other rights—further emphasizing the existing conceptual gap within communication rights. In this subsection, I will present two ways in which CRI might be justified. In both cases I will first indicate a general way to justify rights. Then I will apply this strategy to the case of CRI. The first strategy for justifying a right is to show that there are interests important enough to hold someone to certain duties which, if observed, would protect those interests.34 An important caveat is in order here: rights do not only protect their right-holders' interests. Indeed, sometimes the most important interest served by a right is the interest of a third party, or the common interest of society as a whole, which would be indirectly protected by the direct protection of the right-holder's interest.35 On this view, for instance, the right to parental leave would be mostly grounded not in any interest of parents, but rather in newborns' interest in being cared for, or in the common interest of a society in its new generations being cared for. Similarly, journalists' right to withhold their sources of information would not rest so much on journalists' interests in keeping their sources secret, but rather on “the interest of all in the free circulation of information which is of public interest,” or on the “usefulness [of this right] to members of the public at large”.36 As these quotes show, communication rights are not alien to the complex relation linking rights and interests. Scanlon shed some light on this intricate relation when he famously argued that freedom of expression protects three kinds of interests. According to him, freedom of expression protects the interests of its right-holders—or, as he calls them, the “participants”—but it also protects the interests of those to whom content is addressed—that is, the “audience”—and of those who might be indirectly affected by the exchange of content—that is, “bystanders”.37 Keeping these complexities in mind, CRI can be justified by appealing to at least two important interests, one of the right-holders, and another of third parties. The first is the interest that every citizen has in becoming well informed, in order to be able to competently advance her own political views. In short, citizens need informative and truthful news in order to understand what political option is best for them. Most references to CRI—some of which I mentioned above—appeal to this individual interest. The second grounding interest of CRI is the interest that every citizen has in her fellows being well informed, so that they do not advance harmful or unjust policies. Note that this line of justification grounds CRI not in any interest of the right-holders themselves, but rather in one of third parties: each citizen's right is grounded in the interest that each of her fellow citizens has in her being well informed. This interest that we have vis-à-vis other citizens arises from the fact that in democracy we face the consequences of choices which, despite their ability to deeply affect our rights and well-being, are promoted by a body of citizens on whom our individual influence is fairly insignificant. Given our vulnerability before the body politic, every one of us has a strong interest in each of our fellows becoming well informed, so that they make sensible choices and avoid promoting harmful or unjust policies. The second general way of justifying rights does not appeal to interests, at least not directly. Instead, it appeals to other rights. This process—known as linkage argumentation—consists in showing that the proper enjoyment of an already justified right is impossible unless another right is granted too. This instrumental right is then justified as a necessary—or at least a very important—condition for the meaningful enjoyment of another right.38 CRI could be justified along these lines by at least two linkage arguments, as follows. The first starts from the assumption that we have a right to live in democracy, and then argues that having a right to be provided with information about public issues is necessary—or at least very important—for preserving democracy. It is hard to see how democracy could function properly, or even how it could last, if citizens were unable to access a supply of informative and truthful news. A largely uninformed citizenry, unprotected against misinformation and fake news, might easily fall prey to demagogues and end up favoring policies that undermine basic democratic values. What is more, manipulated citizens might easily be misled into choosing undemocratic leaders who attempt to overthrow democracy by subverting the institutional order. An unaware citizenry might not detect these subversive tactics until it is too late, and for that reason, if we have a right to live in a democracy, then we also need a democratic right to be well informed. The second linkage argument derives CRI from political rights, such as the rights to vote and to demonstrate.39 The core of this argument is that political decisions cannot be considered autonomous—and therefore the exercise of political rights cannot be meaningful—unless citizens are given a fair chance to inform themselves and reflect on what is best. The value of a choice resides in its expressing the autonomy of an agent who chooses freely. As Scanlon says, “lack of information (or false belief) can render a choice involuntary in the relevant sense, undermining its legitimating force”.40 For this reason, a meaningful exercise of political rights requires that citizens can easily access an adequate supply of informative news—just as CRI states—so that their decisions express their autonomous choices rather than manufactured or ill-formed preferences. As Levitsky and Ziblatt claim, “[c]itizens have a basic right to information in a democracy,” because “[w]ithout credible information about what our elected leaders do, we cannot effectively exercise our right to vote.”41 Of course, having a right to be well informed does not entail becoming well informed. It merely entails a fair chance to do so. But that fair chance makes a crucial difference, for an uninformed vote has a very different value depending on whether the voter could or could not have informed herself. In sum, CRI can be justified in at least four different ways, depending on whether one appeals to its (individual or collective) grounding interests, to the right to live in a democracy, or to political rights. A complete exploration of these lines of justification, their problems, and their compatibility, remains to be done. For now, let's focus on the main traits of CRI. As can be inferred from its previous appearances in different disciplines, the function of CRI is to promote the ideal of a well-informed citizenry as a means to further a well-functioning democracy. As a right of the public, its specific purpose is to guarantee that citizens are provided with the information that they need to become competent enough to carry out their democratic duties and make well-grounded political decisions. This suggests that CRI resembles political rights or, more specifically, democratic rights. Political rights are those which are constitutive of a specific form of government, in that they make it possible. Democratic rights are the subgroup of political rights that make democratic government possible. The right to vote, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press are usually included among them.42 Given the democratic function served by CRI, we have good reasons to include it within the category of democratic rights. To further clarify the specificity of this function, let me contrast it with the functions served by the other two best-known rights of the public. The function of FOI is to promote transparency: that is, to enable citizens to learn about the administration so that they can understand it and hold it accountable. To be sure, transparency is a necessary condition for having a well-informed citizenry: if citizens could not learn about the administration, then they could hardly be competent political decision-makers. However, CRI does not aim to create a transparent administration. Instead, it aims to promote knowledge about the issues that are worth knowing for citizens qua citizens, regardless of whether those issues impinge upon the actions of the administration. This function presupposes that information about public institutions is generally available, but it is conceptually different from the function of promoting transparency. Indeed, it goes beyond that. Let me illustrate this difference with an example. During the Covid crisis, FOI gave citizens a right to access official do

In his article, “The Space between Justice and Legitimacy”, Kit Wellman offers a novel account of the relationship between political philosophy's two central concepts.1 He argues that states can be legitimate yet impose many unjust laws and policies. This is true, he suggests, because political legitimacy should be understood as a claim about wide proportionality.2 Just as a country's war can be widely proportionate overall, and yet contain many instances of injustice, states can be proportionate (that is, legitimate) overall, yet contain a fair amount of injustice. But although Wellman thinks legitimate injustice is, in this sense, a real and pervasive phenomenon, he goes on to argue that legitimacy doesn't have much practical relevance with regard to unjust laws and policies. It doesn't make it permissible to impose and enforce unjust laws, nor does it generate an obligation to comply with unjust laws. Like Wellman, I think legitimate injustice is real and pervasive. But I don't share his view of this phenomenon and, as a result, I also don't agree with him about the practical implications of legitimate injustice. Contra Wellman, I think state officials can act permissibly when they enforce unjust but legitimate law, and I think they have claim rights against being interfered with when they do so. Before we begin, it will help to clarify what's at stake in labeling a state legitimate. There are many competing conceptions of political legitimacy in the literature, but, as Wellman says, “virtually everyone agrees that legitimacy at least entitles a state to coerce its constituents”.3 Following Wellman, I will assume this is, at a minimum, what's at stake in determining whether a state is legitimate. Other things being equal, a legitimate political authority is presumptively permitted to coerce its constituents in at least some ways that illegitimate authorities are not permitted to do. Wellman believes legitimate states can act unjustly, and he defends this view by appeal to a particular notion of proportionality. Just as it can be morally permissible to launch a war even when we can foresee that some of our troops will commit unjust crimes during its course, a state can be legitimate even though we know it sometimes commits injustice. In both cases, we weigh the good things that will be achieved if we proceed against all the harms or costs that will be caused. Provided the goods are sufficiently great to outweigh the harms or costs, the proposed course of action or the institution can be defended on the basis that the benefits are proportionate relative to the costs.4 As Wellman puts it, “Because states perform such incredibly valuable functions … they are worth at least some moral costs”.5 This is, on Wellman's view, simply what it is for a state to be legitimate. When the benefits the state provides are proportionate relative to the costs (including the injustices the state commits), the state is morally legitimate. This is an innovative way of thinking about the relationship between justice and political legitimacy. But I do not think it can be correct. In the ethics of self-defense and war, the standard way to determine whether some act is proportionate is to weigh the costs and benefits that will be caused by our action against the alternative of doing nothing.6 Suppose the only way to defend one innocent person from having her legs unjustly broken is by throwing a grenade that will kill two innocent bystanders. The act of throwing the grenade is not proportionate, because the costs of doing so (two innocent people are killed) are much worse than the alternative of doing nothing (one innocent person's legs get broken). If, however, these costs were reversed—if doing nothing meant two innocent people get killed, whereas throwing the grenade meant only one innocent person's legs get broken—then we might conclude throwing the grenade is proportionate. If we are to use wide proportionality to assess a state's legitimacy, we need to engage in a similar comparison. The difficulty, however, is that the state is unlike a harmful act that we contemplate performing, and so it's less clear what it might mean to ask, “are the costs created by the state proportionate relative to the alternative of doing nothing?”. How should we understand the benchmark of “doing nothing”? To see why I remain convinced that the gap between justice and legitimacy exists, let us return to the contrast between a slave-owner who forces slaves to build a pyramid and the prime minister of Norway. If I were the slave-owner, there is no question that I would be morally required to immediately free all of my slaves, even if there is no other way for me to build the pyramid. If I were the prime minister of Norway with the extraordinary power to unilaterally dismantle this government, however, I would not feel obligated to do so.7 Dismantle. A state is proportionate, and thus legitimate, when we would not be morally required to dismantle the government in order to prevent or halt the injustices the state commits. But this doesn't look like a good test. First, it's not clear what we are supposed to imagine occurs if the government or the state is dismantled. Maybe we should consider what would realistically occur in this particular country if its government or state apparatus suddenly ceased to exist. In many cases, what would occur might be terrible. In some places, civil war or ethnic cleansing might be the consequence of suddenly dismantling a government. In these cases, we would not be morally required to disband the government even if it were very, very bad. Even a brutal authoritarian regime might be preferable to civil war or ethnic cleansing, but surely that does not make a brutal authoritarian regime morally legitimate; it does not give that regime the moral permission to coerce its citizens to do things that they are not independently required to do. A regime is not morally legitimate merely because it is preferable to some of the worst conditions on earth.8 One problem with trying to conceptualize political legitimacy as a species of proportionality is that we almost never face a binary choice between our current political institutions as they are or else the total absence of those political institutions. Consider the Southern United States during the Jim Crow era. If the only two options were (1) retain the existing racist laws and institutions, or (2) a descent into an extremely dangerous form of anarchy, it's at least possible that option (1) might be widely proportionate relative to the benchmark of (2). But, of course, those weren't the only two options. Radically reforming the existing laws and institutions to make them less racist and unjust was a feasible option, and the very fact that it was a feasible option is surely part of the explanation as to why the racist political institutions might not have been morally legitimate. the appropriate baseline for testing proportionality must be the feasible alternatives rather than simply doing nothing at all. Just as a military intervention would not be proportionate if there were an equally effective and less costly diplomatic option available, a brutal dictator cannot justify the injustices of her regime if a more just political arrangement is within reach.9 But Wellman's statement here is puzzling for two reasons. First, this isn't how proportionality has standardly been conceptualized in the ethics of self-defense and war. As I've already explained, proportionality judgments are typically made by comparing a given act of harm-imposition relative to the benchmark of doing nothing. The entire set of feasible alternatives, however, is relevant with regard to a different moral judgment, namely, necessity. Philosophers working on self-defense and war typically claim that for an instance of harm-imposition to be morally permissible it must meet the condition of being necessary. Although there is a great deal of disagreement about how exactly to conceptualize the necessity condition, there is widespread agreement that judgments of necessity are made by comparing the potential act of harm-imposition to all the feasible alternatives.10 Killing a wrongful aggressor, for example, is not necessary if one of the defender's feasible alternatives is painlessly rendering the aggressor unconscious. Thus, although it's a matter of some dispute, on the most widely accepted picture, wide proportionality and necessity are two separate constraints on the permissible use of force. To be morally permissible, it's generally believed a harmful act must, among other things, satisfy both these constraints. All Alternatives. A state is proportionate, and thus legitimate, only when the net balance of benefits and costs it currently provides is proportionate relative to every feasible alternative. This test isn't helpful if we seek to explain how any existing state could ever be legitimate. It's surely true that every existing state has at least some unjust laws or unjust institutions which could be reformed to eliminate the injustice without becoming more unjust in other ways. It's thus true that, for every existing state, the status quo is not proportionate relative to a feasible alternative, and thus every existing state is illegitimate. The problem is even more stark, since this view has the implication that even hypothetical states that are far more just than any existing state would still be illegitimate so long as they contain even a single unjust law or institution that could feasibly be reformed. I think it's clear that these are not the conclusions Wellman seeks to defend. Wellman might reply that it's not feasible for a state to be entirely devoid of unjust laws or institutions; realistically, our best efforts to design and sustain political institutions will always contain some unjust features. But this reply involves shifting from the standard of “feasible” to the standard of “probable” or “likely”. Although the term feasible is contested,11 I suspect it's most commonly used to refer to whether achieving a given outcome is possible given our resources and technological limitations. In this sense, changing the laws regulating gun ownership in the US is clearly feasible. Of course, it is extremely unlikely that robust gun control legislation will be enacted in the US for reasons of ideology and political self-interest. Suppose, then, we take All Alternatives to refer only to those alternatives that are sufficiently likely to obtain. This would then vastly lower the bar for legitimacy. Even highly unjust states can be legitimate so long as it is sufficiently unlikely that they will become more just. The problem with this interpretation, however, is fairly obvious. It's often the case that laws or institutions are unlikely to be reformed because those who hold power don't want to reform them. It might, for example, be very unlikely that we can reform the unjust institutions in a country because the country is ruled by a tyrant who refuses to relinquish power and rules by violently suppressing dissent. On this interpretation, the tyrant can render his rule legitimate by forming a settled disposition to hang on to power through unjust means. I take this result to be a reductio of the proposed interpretation of the proportionality test. In sum, I don't see how the idea of wide proportionality can be made to work as an account of political legitimacy. One test for proportionality that Wellman seems to suggest—Dismantle—is far too weak a standard. It's too weak, in part, because it ignores the fact that we never face a binary choice between the status quo and dismantling the state. We always have many other feasible alternatives, which include reforming the unjust laws and institutions of our state. But the other test that Wellman floats—All Alternatives—creates either an unacceptably high standard or an unacceptably low one. If we focus on all feasible alternatives, then the bar for legitimacy is far too high—no existing state meets it and no hypothetical state with even a single unjust law meets it. But if we focus on likely or probable alternatives, then the bar is too low: very bad actors can render themselves legitimate by refusing to meet minimal moral standards they could meet if they wanted to. In each case Wellman argues that the answer is “no”. So, although legitimate states act unjustly, the fact that these injustices are perpetrated by legitimate states doesn't have many interesting practical consequences for the unjust laws the state attempts to impose. The state's legitimacy doesn't give it a special permission to act unjustly, it doesn't ground a duty to obey unjust laws, and it doesn't give the state a protected right to act unjustly. I disagree with Wellman on all three questions, but here I will focus only on the first. I think we should expect there to be a great deal of reasonable disagreement about justice. By that I mean that smart, sensible people, thinking clearly, who aren't driven by self-interest or prejudice, and who are committed to trying to treat others fairly, can and will disagree about many matters of justice, including difficult questions such as “What rates of income tax are required as a matter of justice?” or “Should freedom of expression extend to protect those who deny the Holocaust in order to promote anti-Semitism?”. But the fact that such people will disagree about the requirements of justice doesn't imply that there are no correct answers to these questions or that the answers are indeterminate—there may sometimes be correct answers in cases of reasonable disagreement. I also think that in cases of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires, a legitimate state should have some sort of democratic process to resolve the reasonable disagreement. Indeed, I think people have a claim of justice to an equal (and positive) say in resolving reasonable disagreements about justice. To disregard democratic decisions whenever one thinks they are unjust is a refusal to participate on equal terms in the political process with other reasonable people. To be clear: I'm not suggesting that unreasonable views about justice—those that are, in some sense, beyond the pale, such as the violations of core liberal rights and freedoms—have a claim to be implemented if selected by a democratic process. I'm only suggesting that some disagreements about justice are reasonable—all the competing views represent plausible interpretations of what justice requires—and that in disagreements of this type, there is a claim of justice to have an egalitarian democratic process for resolving the disagreements. Obviously, what I've just said is only the briefest sketch, and many details need to be filled in. But here is one way in which the view that I have sketched is inconsistent with Wellman's answers to the three questions above, in particular the first question: do legitimate states act permissibly when they act unjustly? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the correct theory of justice includes a very expansive principle of free speech, one that provides a protected claim right against interference to people who engage in hate speech—for example, Nazis who wish to march and chant anti-Semitic slurs in Jewish neighborhoods. But the issue is one over which reasonable people disagree, and after a fair democratic process, our political community enacts a law that prohibits certain forms of hate speech, including the Nazis' anti-Semitic march. I think justice requires giving people equal opportunity to exercise political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. If the government doesn't do what it has been directed to do by a fair democratic process (within the boundaries of the reasonable), it will be acting unjustly—failing to respect what justice requires regarding the distribution of political power. So if state officials decline to enforce the prohibition against the Nazis' march, they will be acting unjustly. However, if the state officials enforce the democratically enacted law prohibiting the march, they act contrary to the principle of free speech, another requirement of justice. So the state will act unjustly whatever it does. If we assume that at least one option from an agent's feasible set must be permissible, then it must be possible for the state to act permissibly and yet unjustly. P5. A fair democratic process sometimes results in the selection of a policy that is reasonable but substantively unjust. Therefore, I'm not sure which premises of this argument Wellman would reject. He might reject P1, but denying it is implausible. It's not credible to suppose that all our disagreements about justice are driven by self-interest, prejudice, or irrationality. I also do not think it is plausible to suppose, as some contemporary Kantians do, that almost all substantive issues of social or distributive justice are largely indeterminate.14 I am sure that many specific questions about the requirements of justice are indeterminate, but this fact is perfectly consistent with P1. P1 makes only the very modest claim that reasonable disagreement is possible even when there are determinate answers about the requirements of justice. I doubt that democracy can do the work we would ask of it here, though, because it is hard to see how voting (or even deliberating, discussing, and voting, if you prefer) on a course of action can magically change its deontic status. If it is impermissible for me to use slaves to build pyramids, for instance, how does it become any more permissible to do so after a democratic process?15 if the sincere but unreasonable beliefs of the majority do not change the moral status of a given course of action, why think that the beliefs of the majority have this moral power as long as the beliefs are not unreasonable? It strikes me as more natural to conclude that the majority has made a reasonable mistake than to suppose that the majority's not unreasonable judgment changes the moral status of a course of action.16 This statement could be taken as a rejection of P2, though Wellman is not explicitly considering P2, so we should tread carefully. In one sense, Wellman is surely correct. The mere fact that reasonable people disagree about whether Φ-ing is permissible surely does not, on its own, affect the deontic status of Φ-ing. But the argument that I've given doesn't move from the mere fact of disagreement to permissibility. Instead it claims that reasonable disagreements about justice require, as a matter of justice, some fair democratic mechanism of resolution. It then moves from this claim to a claim about the permissibility of injustice, via the assumption (P4) that at least one option from an agent's set must be permissible. My argument thus provides the answer to Wellman's rhetorical question: the beliefs of the majority might have this moral power because justice requires a democratic resolution of some of our reasonable disagreements. I worry, though, that it depends on a misunderstanding of the moral value of procedural justice. In my view, justice in both its procedural and substantive incarnations provides side-constraints to be respected, rather than competing values to be promoted … even if an egalitarian democrat's argument establishes that each of us has a right to democratic governance, it at most establishes that acting justly includes an additional side-constraint, but this is very different from showing that procedural justice is a value which sometimes outweighs, overrides, or undercuts the moral imperative to respect nonprocedural rights.17 In this passage Wellman points out something that egalitarian democrats sometimes ignore—the mere fact that there is something valuable about democratic procedures does not suffice, on its own, to show that the scope of the right to democratic governance extends to cover substantively unjust decisions. But the idea that claims of justice operate as side-constraints is notoriously tricky. Most obviously, what happens when two claims of justice conflict? Some proponents of the side-constraint view argue that this is conceptually impossible. Claims of justice, by their very nature, can never come into conflict.18 But this is very difficult to accept; it is sharply at odds with commonsense morality. This view requires either (a) that the content of justice be extremely sparse, so as to eliminate the possibility of conflicts arising, or else (b) a kind of specificationism about justice, such that whenever we have an apparent conflict of claims, we must conclude that in those specific circumstances, only one of the claims turns out to be a valid claim of justice. I think there are compelling reasons to reject both of these options, though I lack the space to lay those out here. It's also worth noting that Wellman doesn't give us any reasons to doubt that claims of justice might sometimes conflict—he just asserts the side-constraint view. But if we accept the commonsense view that claims of justice can sometimes conflict, then we can easily accept P2. And it's worth emphasizing how revisionary and counterintuitive it would be to deny P2. To deny P2 would mean that there need be nothing unjust about stuffing ballot boxes or suppressing other people's votes, provided doing so is a way of ensuring that only truly just policies are enacted. P3 seems uncontroversial if P2 has been accepted. P4 is not uncontroversial: a minority of philosophers claims that in some situations an agent will act wrongly regardless of what she does. Entering this debate is beyond the scope of this article, so I'll simply say that, along with many others, I think P4 is true: there must be a permissible option in an agent's set of choices.19 And P5 does not seem controversial if P1 is accepted. And so I disagree with Wellman: I think a legitimate state and its officials can sometimes act permissibly even though they act unjustly. I also disagree with Wellman about the second and third questions, but I won't pursue those disagreements here. The phenomenon of legitimate injustice is deeply puzzling, and I share the skepticism that Wellman expresses about the capacity of some recent work in political philosophy to provide an adequate account of this phenomenon. But we can't, I have argued, understand legitimate injustice as an instance of harms that are proportionate in light of all the good consequences that a state delivers. We should instead understand legitimate injustice as something that arises as a result of the complex and multi-dimensional nature of justice itself. There are principles of justice that apply to the distribution of political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. When these principles conflict with other substantive principles of justice, the phenomenon of legitimate injustice arises. This is because, in such situations, the state and its officials cannot avoid injustice. This fact, contra Wellman, has significant practical implications for permissible conduct in politics. On my view, unlike Wellman's, the moral legitimacy of a law does real practical work—it can render permissible conduct that would otherwise be impermissible, and it can explain why public officials have claim rights against interference even in some cases where they threaten to infringe claims of justice. Nothing I've said here constitutes an argument for the view that a principle of justice concerning the distribution of political power should ever take precedence over more substantive claims of justice. I do think this view is correct, but this isn't the place to present that argument. For comments and discussion, I am very grateful to Peter de Marneffe, Rebecca Stone, Paul Weithman, Kit Wellman, Leif Wenar, and an anonymous referee. None relevant. There are no potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article. The author declares human ethics approval was not needed for this study. All relevant data are included in the article.

Recent history has seen a rapid growth in the involvement of private parties in war conflicts.In 2020, there were almost twice as many private contractors as US soldiers in Afghanistan. 1 In the ongoing war in Ukraine, private actors are allegedly deployed by both parties in the conflict. 2Originally hired by states to provide support services from catering to logistics, private military firms (PMFs) have progressively taken on functions, including combat tasks, that were deemed, at least in the last century, inherently governmental. 3 The phenomenon amounts to an unprecedented form of corporatized mercenarism. 4 The condemnation of mercenarism has an illustrious history.While Machiavelli famously deprecated mercenaries' lack of loyalty and tendency to corrupt the state, 5 Rousseau worried that hiring mercenaries, rather than having citizens fight wars, would lead the latter to value comfort more than republican freedom.Recent critics argue, among other things, that fighting for profit is inherently wrong; 6 that the privatization of war leads to an unjust distribution of access to security; 7 that it allows both states and private parties to escape democratic accountability; 8 and that it provides incentives to escalate conflicts and to increase the use of violence in the battlefield. 9Some contemporary philosophers have, on the other side, shown a friendlier face towards mercenarism.Most prominently, Cécile Fabre argues that, at least under ideal circumstances, private parties have a right to sell their soldiering 1 Bilmes 2021. 2

It is good for people to flourish. But does the state have the authority to promote the flourishing of its citizens? Some political philosophers—perfectionists—hold that it does.1 For perfectionists, the state has the authority to pursue policies meant to promote the flourishing of its citizens, and it is appropriate for the state, or state officials, to take considerations about what will promote flourishing into account when exercising their authority. Traditionally for perfectionists, the fact that a policy will promote the flourishing of the citizens may legitimate the state's using its authority to pursue that policy, even if the policy does not promote any non-perfectionist aims— that is, aims other than flourishing. Other political philosophers—anti-perfectionists—hold that the state acts illegitimately when it tries to promote flourishing.2 These philosophers hold that the state does not have the authority to try to promote flourishing and that flourishing does not legitimate the extension of state authority to pursue a particular policy. One influential anti-perfectionist argument for this conclusion is that, however good it is for people to flourish, considerations about flourishing are not the appropriate grounds for political authority, and so it is an illegitimate extension of authority contrary to people's rights when the state uses its authority to promote flourishing. Let's call this argument the legitimacy objection to perfectionism.3 How should perfectionists answer this argument? After discussing the legitimacy objection in Section II, I explore one common perfectionist response in Section III—that there are natural or political duties to promote people's flourishing that can ground the state's authority to promote flourishing.4 I am skeptical that responses of this kind are dialectically effective. Rather, in Section IV, I suggest that the appropriate space for perfectionist state action lies in using considerations about flourishing to select among courses of state action that the state may legitimately pursue for non-perfectionist reasons. This consideration-based perfectionism allows officials to take considerations about flourishing seriously, without extending the legitimate scope of state authority, thereby avoiding the legitimacy objection. This shows that there are two distinct roles that flourishing could play within political life. On the one hand, flourishing could be something that the state is sensitive to in making its decisions. On the other hand, flourishing could be something that partially grounds the domain of legitimate state authority. The ability of consideration-based perfectionism to avoid the legitimacy objection shows how these roles can come apart—the state can be sensitive to flourishing even if flourishing does not partially ground the domain of legitimate state authority. Proponents of the legitimacy objection collapse together two distinct roles that flourishing can play in politics, and assume that responding to one role, the ability to legitimate state action, is sufficient to reject perfectionism in politics. In Section V, I explore how recognizing these two roles alters the effectiveness of different anti-perfectionist responses to perfectionism, by comparing political liberal and Kantian responses. This puts into relief questions about what anti-perfectionists find to be fundamentally problematic about perfectionism. Before discussing the legitimacy objection, it is important to clarify the targets of the objection and the goals of those proposing the objection—what it means to be a perfectionist and an anti-perfectionist. Here I understand the distinction between perfectionism and anti-perfectionism as those presenting the legitimacy objection understand it: whether the state acts legitimately when it undertakes laws and policies to promote flourishing.5 Legitimacy, in the most general sense, concerns the state's moral authority to issue rules that citizens have an enforceable obligation to comply with. Some particular law or policy, then, is legitimate for the state to adopt if the state, first, has the moral right to create enforceable obligations for the citizens to comply with the law or policy—it has the moral authority to create those rules—and, second, the state exercises this right in a permissible way—for example, by exercising the right using a permissible procedure. States act illegitimately when they exceed their authority or when they exercise their authority in an impermissible way. Traditionally, perfectionists hold that the fact that some law or policy contributes to human flourishing can partially ground the state's right to issue and enforce the law or policy—the state has the authority to promote flourishing—and that the state can permissibly exercise its authority to promote flourishing. Perfectionists hold, then, that a legitimate function of the state is to promote flourishing. This can be held more or less strongly. Some perfectionists claim that the state has a duty to promote flourishing (duty-based perfectionism), while other perfectionists merely claim that it is permissible for the state to promote flourishing (permission-based perfectionism).6 My discussion of the legitimacy objection will not presuppose either form of perfectionism.7 This leads to the question of what is meant by flourishing. As a general concept, flourishing consists in living a life that has intrinsic value. Different perfectionist theories provide different accounts of what it is for a life to have intrinsic value—whether it is in making autonomous choices that guide one's life, developing and exercising certain capacities, possessing various excellences, and so forth.8 One commonality between these views is that claims about intrinsically valuable lives have some objective component—some component that does not depend on an agent's attitude toward their own life and its value.9 Considerations about flourishing within politics, then, are considerations about what will contribute to the intrinsic value of lives and what laws and policies will facilitate citizens having intrinsically valuable lives. To add to the previous paragraph, perfectionists hold that the state may seek to promote its citizens leading intrinsically valuable lives. the power of the state should not be used to promote some ideals or discourage others, but rather should be used to provide a fair framework of rules and institutions within which each citizen can pursue his or her own view of the good life.10 While the state may enact policies that differentially impact people's ability to flourish—the state need not be neutral with respect to the effects of its policies on people's ability to flourish—the state only has the authority to pursue non-perfectionist ends. For example, the Rawlsian conception of justice denies that the state has the authority to promote any particular conception of flourishing, but does hold that the state should promote certain “primary goods,” which citizens can use to pursue their own conception of flourishing.11 These goods are determined based on the conception of the citizen within Rawls's theory of justice, and not in terms of their relation to flourishing.12 Anti-perfectionists may therefore allow that non-perfectionist considerations can identify certain goods to be promoted, but deny that what grounds the legitimacy of promoting these goods is their contribution to flourishing. The dispute between perfectionists and anti-perfectionists, then, concerns the role that flourishing may play in political life. Perfectionists hold that it is legitimate for the state to seek to promote flourishing, while anti-perfectionists hold that undertaking state action to promote flourishing is beyond the legitimate scope of state authority. The basic idea behind the legitimacy objection is that considerations about flourishing are not the right basis to ground the state's moral authority, and the state has the authority to promote only what grounds its moral authority. For the state only has that authority necessary to satisfy the justification for its rule—states do not have the authority to pursue their own independent projects. Since flourishing is not part of the basis on which the state has the right to rule, the state does not have the authority to promote flourishing itself. Correspondingly, the perfectionist claim that the state may legitimately implement policies for the sake of promoting flourishing requires an illegitimate extension of the state's authority.13 Why hold that considerations about flourishing are not the right basis for grounding the state's right to rule? The basic thought is that people—as free beings—have certain natural rights against being subjected to authority for certain kinds of reasons—reasons concerning what will lead to people's lives being better off overall. Anti-perfectionists, such as Jonathan Quong and Japa Pallikkathayil, typically generate this thought through various intuitive cases where it seems inappropriate to hold that one person is subject to the authority of another, even though it might make their life go better overall. For example, the fact that my brother is best suited to manage my finances, and so I have most reason to give him control of my finances, does not justify him taking control of my finances.14 It is a good idea for me to give him control, but the mere fact that it is a good idea does not ground a claim on his part, or anyone else's part, to wrest control from me and give it to him. I have a claim against being subject to another's authority on these kinds of grounds. This claim extends as well to being subject to another's authority to promote the flourishing of others. Just as I have my own life to live, my brother similarly has his own life to live, and so I, and others, lack the authority to make my brother manage my finances to ensure my financial well-being.15 The mere fact that I, and perhaps others, will flourish if my brother provides me services does not ground a claim to wrest control from his life to provide me with that service. My brother is not bound to be subject to anyone's authority for the sake of promoting the flourishing of others; this does not seem like the right kind of reason to subject him to anyone's authority. Let's call people's claim against others having the authority to interfere in their lives for certain reasons their right to live their own life consistent with an equal right of others to live theirs, or, more simply, people's right to live their own life.16 The general thought behind this right is that each person has their own life to live and so has authority in terms of setting their own purposes to pursue with their life, compatible with a similar authority given to others. This is a way of conceptualizing persons as free beings—they are free insofar as they are not subject to anyone's constraints in setting what ends to pursue.17 To subject my brother to an authority to promote my flourishing, then, is inconsistent with this conception of persons. My brother's life is not simply a means for promoting value within the world or ensuring that other people's lives are valuable. Rather, his life is something for him to live. To subject him to an authority on the grounds that it will promote my flourishing or his own flourishing, is to treat his life as subordinate to the promotion of this value. The right to live one's own life, then, is understood, among other things, as a constraint on the kinds of justifications that can be given for authority—justifications premised on benefit, including flourishing, cannot ground claims to authority. The legitimacy objection then proceeds as follows. Perfectionist justifications of state authority hold that the state has authority over people for the sake of promoting human flourishing. That is, the state has the authority to promote human flourishing as a distinctive goal over and above whatever non-perfectionist goals the state may have. Correspondingly, non-perfectionist justifications of state authority will not legitimate perfectionist exercises of state authority—such exercises extend the state's authority without furthering non-perfectionist goals. This extension of authority, then, needs to be grounded on the basis of promoting flourishing itself. But this is incompatible with people's right to live their own life—this right protects against being subject to an authority on the grounds of mere promotion of benefit, such as human flourishing. The fact that some course of action will promote people's flourishing cannot justify the claim that the state has legitimate authority to pursue that course of action, and so the state illegitimately exceeds its authority through implementing laws for purposes that are beyond the scope of state authority.18 Anti-perfectionists do not hold that the legitimacy objection undermines all political authority, only that it undermines perfectionist political authority. For anti-perfectionists still claim that states have the legitimate authority to pursue non-perfectionist ends. Before continuing on to how perfectionists might respond to this objection, it is important to see why anti-perfectionists think that states have the legitimate authority to pursue non-perfectionist ends. This provides a standard for what kinds of arguments anti-perfectionists find acceptable as responses to the legitimacy objection, and so a potential template for perfectionists to follow in responding to the objection. One common account presented by anti-perfectionists focuses on people's enforceable natural duties.19 By “enforceable natural duties” I mean the duties that people have prior to and independent from entering into a political society or other association with people that can ground the use of coercive force on the part of others to generate compliance. I do not assume, though, that all moral duties are enforceable natural duties—some moral duties may fail to ground coercion and some might only arise subsequent to an association with others. The basic argument, then, is that the state's legitimate authority is grounded on people's natural duties. There are two ways that a natural duty account of the state's legitimate authority might proceed. The first, adopted by some liberals such as Quong, is to hold that there are some natural duties that override or limit people's right to live their own life—such as the duty to rescue others in peril.20 The idea, then, is that insofar as I have an enforceable duty to another, I do not have a right to fulfill that duty in whatever way I wish. Rather, I must take the course of action that will do the most to fulfill my natural duties.21 In cases where following the authority of another will greatly increase the likelihood that I and others will fulfill our natural duties, we are obligated to comply with that authority or be subject to coercion to enforce compliance. In these cases, I cannot appeal to the right to live my own life against this authority, because that authority is based on a duty that already limits my right to live my own life. Insofar, then, as the state is able to greatly increase the ability of citizens to comply with their various natural duties, the state correspondingly has legitimate authority over them, at least for those purposes.22 Let's call this the “liberal response” to the legitimacy objection. The second way that a natural duty account of the state's legitimate authority might proceed is by holding that people's right to live their own life itself provides people with enforceable natural duties. This account is favored by Kantians such as Pallikkathayil.23 The basic idea here is that people's right to live their own life gives people an enforceable natural duty to create the conditions for people to live their own lives. But, the argument goes, this duty cannot be discharged absent the state—the state is necessary to secure the conditions for people to live their own lives through setting up systems of property and contract, resolving disputes between persons, and so forth. As with the liberal response, people have no claim on the grounds of their right to live their own lives against the state having this authority, because it is that very same right which licenses the state to have this authority over them. Let's call this the “Kantian response” to the legitimacy objection. This presentation of these anti-perfectionist responses to the legitimacy objection is not meant to show that anti-perfectionists successfully demonstrate that the legitimacy objection allows non-perfectionist state action. Rather, it is meant to show the standard that anti-perfectionists hold themselves to in determining whether the state's authority is legitimate. In this respect, the central claim in the liberal and Kantian responses is similar—the justification of state authority relies on some enforceable natural duty that already constrains a person's right to live their own life. For these views, such duties define the scope of legitimate state authority and ground a range of non-perfectionist ends that the state may pursue. One perfectionist response to the legitimacy objection is to argue for the state's authority to promote flourishing using the same method as anti-perfectionists. That is, some perfectionists argue that the authority to promote flourishing is grounded on a duty to promote the flourishing of others.24 If there are such duties, then it is possible to ground the state's authority to promote flourishing on the basis of fulfilling such a duty, just like the natural duties anti-perfectionists invoke. To this end, some perfectionists hold that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing—a duty that arises prior to any form of political organization—while other perfectionists argue that there is a political duty—a duty that arises within political society—to promote flourishing. In Section III.I, I will discuss the position that the duty to promote flourishing is a natural duty held by individuals, and I will address the second possibility in Section III.II. The idea that people have a natural duty to promote flourishing just holds that, among whatever other natural duties people may have, one duty is to promote the flourishing of both oneself and others. Perfectionists often ground duties to promote flourishing on people's interest in flourishing itself.25 For instance, Joseph Raz argues that “[s]ince autonomy is morally valuable there is reason for everyone to make himself and everyone else autonomous” and so there is a duty to promote the conditions to make people autonomous.26 The value of people's flourishing—living a self-directed, autonomous life for Raz—grounds people's duty to promote flourishing. The assumption here is that people's interest in flourishing is sufficiently weighty to ground an enforceable duty to promote the conditions for flourishing, which can then ground the state's authority to promote flourishing.27 There is something dialectically odd about this argument. Anti-perfectionists appeal to intuitions which deny that people's interest in flourishing can ground claims to authority over people. Perfectionists, then, hold that people's interest in flourishing grounds a natural duty to promote flourishing, which then grounds claims to authority. But the intuitions to which anti-perfectionists appeal should also support denying that people's interest in flourishing can ground the relevant kind of duty that can ground a claim to authority. For basing a natural duty to promote flourishing on people's interest in flourishing seems to just amount to restricting people's right to live their own life for mere benefit. The interest in flourishing plays the same role in both cases in grounding a restriction on people's authority over their own lives; the difference is just whether this restriction subjects people to a duty or an authority. Anti-perfectionists who endorse the legitimacy objection, then, are already committed to denying that there are natural duties to promote flourishing.28 It is therefore not clear why this alternative conceptualization of how flourishing might ground the state's authority should undermine the general intuition that anti-perfectionists have. Perfectionists might respond to this by giving intuitions that support the duty to promote the flourishing of both oneself and others. But rarely are such intuitions actually given. Take, for instance, Steven Wall's argument that the right to live one's own life may be constrained by perfectionist considerations. He argues that, intuitively, “we do not have a right, grounded in autonomy [that is, our right to live our own lives], to form and execute plans designed to harm others, even if we take care not to contravene their equal right to autonomy,” where this “harm” is understood to be a failure to satisfy our duties to promote the flourishing of others.29 While Wall finds this claim intuitive, he provides no concrete, intuitive cases to support it, no instance where a person has a natural duty to promote flourishing that might ground another's authority without also including the violation of some other natural duty.30 It is unclear, then, why anti-perfectionists should accept such arguments as dialectically effective—it seems to be just a bare rejection of the anti-perfectionists' claims, without the appeal to a common set of shared judgments that might support the controversial principle. This, of course, does not show that there are no such perfectionist natural duties. But it does make it unlikely that appeals to such duties can make effective headway against the legitimacy objection. Such a response seems doomed to a dialectical stalemate, with perfectionists and anti-perfectionists each appealing to a competing set of intuitions. To make progress against the legitimacy objection, some alternative argument is needed. One alternative is for perfectionists to argue that political societies—that is, the state—have a duty to promote flourishing. What might the argument for the state's duty to promote people's flourishing look like? Collis Tahzib has recently proposed such a duty within a broader Rawlsian political framework.31 He argues that people in an “original position” scenario, selecting principles of justice to govern the state's conduct, would include a right against the state to the fair conditions for living a flourishing life, which gives rise to a duty on the part of the state. This duty then competes with some of the state's other duties, such as distributive goals like satisfying the difference principle. The basic thought is that given people have an interest in flourishing, they would prefer to flourish more rather than less. While no one can demand the right to flourish itself—since that would not be sensitive to their own responsibility with respect to their flourishing—it seems appropriate that agents might demand the right to the fair conditions of flourishing. The state determines, in part, whether we have a fair shot at securing our flourishing through the institutions that govern the structure of society and the public culture that the state cultivates. Agents in the original position would thus find it “reasonable and prudent” to select a set of principles to govern society which include a duty on the part of the state to secure and maintain fair conditions for people's flourishing.32 This gives us grounds for thinking that the state has a duty to promote flourishing. Suppose that Tahzib's argument succeeds in showing that the state has a duty to promote flourishing, or the fair conditions for flourishing. Does that show that the state has the authority to promote flourishing? I am skeptical that the mere demonstration that the state has a duty to promote flourishing shows that the state has the authority to promote it. This is due to a general fact about the relationship between an agent's duties and their authority over others. The fact that an agent has a duty does not entail that the agent has any additional authority—any additional powers or claim rights over citizens—to carry out that duty. For example, suppose I make a promise to drive my friend to the airport, and so have a duty to drive them there. This gives me a duty to acquire the necessary means to drive them to the airport—such as a car—but it does not give me any additional authority over others such that they must provide me the means necessary to drive my friend. If I lack a car, the fact that I have a duty to drive my friend does not give me authority over anyone else to commandeer their car. I only have authority over whatever I had prior to the duty. The basic reason for this comes from people's right to live their own life. If agents could acquire authority over others simply by incurring duties, then people's right to live their own life becomes subject to the duties incurred through the decision to associate by others, undermining their authority over their own life. It must be shown that providing the agents with the authority to fulfill this duty is compatible with people's right to live their own life, and so an additional argument is needed. A worry here may be that there is a difference between me having authority over others through making a promise and the state having authority over its citizens to fulfill its duties. For citizens compose the state, and so it might seem that if the state has a duty, then the citizens must also have that duty by virtue of their composing the state. I doubt that this move can be so easily made—the relationship between the duties of a group agent and those who compose the group agent is complex. For instance, a corporation might be subject to an obligation—for example, to pay a fine—without agents comprising the corporation also being subject to that obligation—that is, the employees are not subject to an obligation to pay the fine. Duties that group agents have do not automatically transfer to all those who compose the group agent. The authority to take the necessary steps for the group agent to discharge its duty has to rely on the pre-existing authority of the group agent over the members of the group, rather than on the fact that the group agent has a duty. Correspondingly, there needs to be an independent argument to show that the state has the authority to fulfill its duty. Further, even if citizens have a duty to promote flourishing based on the state's duty, this does not show that this is the right kind of duty to extend the state's authority. For citizens can have political duties that are also unenforceable, and so do not extend the state's authority. One potential example is the duty of civility—the duty of citizens to provide public reasons that other reasonable citizens can accept in political deliberations—proposed by some anti-perfectionists such as Quong, and to which Tahzib also subscribes.33 This duty is “a moral, not a legal, duty,” it is not enforced by the state or its laws, but rather, perhaps, by the disapproval or condemnation of other citizens.34 Anti-perfectionists can thus hold that it is an illegitimate assumption to argue from the fact that citizens have a political duty to the conclusion that this duty extends the authority of the state. For there still remains the question of whether this duty is an enforceable duty, a duty that constrains people's right to live their own life, and which therefore can ground the authority of the state to promote flourishing. An additional argument is thus required to show that the political duty of the state translates to an extension of state authority. The discussion in Section II.III shows how anti-perfectionists like Quong and Pallikkathayil might argue for which political duties extend the state's authority consistent with people's right to live their own lives: the fact that certain political duties follow from people's natural duties.35 For Tahzib to make a similar claim for the duty to promote flourishing, he would need to argue that the authority to promote flourishing follows from people's natural duties—that is, that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing. Otherwise, it seems to just be an assumption that it is already within the state's authority to promote people's flourishing, and the duty just directs how the state may exercise its authority. Tahzib's argument at most shows that the state has the duty to promote perfectionist conditions, but not that this duty extends the legitimate authority of the state to promote perfectionist conditions. This reveals a general problem for perfectionist arguments for the state having the authority to pursue perfectionist policies based on the claim that the state has a duty to promote flourishing. Demonstrating such a duty is insufficient to demonstrate the claim to authority, unless perfectionists can also show that such a duty limits people's right to live their own life. The clearest way for perfectionists to do this, though, requires that perfectionists show that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing. As I argued in Section III.I, arguing against the legitimacy objection on the basis of a natural duty to promote flourishing is dialectically ineffective, as the same intuitions that support the legitimacy objection also support denying that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing. A dialectical stalemate remains. Both perfectionists and anti-perfectionists assume that the debate over whether the state has the authority to promote flourishing is about whether the state may legitimately exercise authority when that authority is exercised for the sake of promoting flourishing. But why not use considerations about flourishing to choose from among the range of legitimate policy options, rather than partially determine that range? That is, instead of considerations about flourishing extending

When discussing theories of justice, most philosophers take the moral equality of human beings as their starting point. As Will Kymlicka says, in all contemporary plausible theories of justice, moral equality constitutes an "egalitarian plateau".1 Arguably, the most prominent novel theory of justice in recent years is relational egalitarianism—a theory on which justice requires people to relate as equals. Relational egalitarians are no exception to Kymlicka's claim. They too start from the idea of moral equality. As one of us previously put it, "as a matter of fact, we are one another's moral equals and in relating as equals we honour that fact, and this is what grounds the ideal of relational egalitarianism".2 Either the proposed basis [the property, or properties, proposed to ground equal moral status] will turn out to vary by degree, and variations above the claimed threshold that establishes equality will give rise to inequality of moral considerability, or the proposed basis will turn out to be one that applies in an all-or-nothing fashion, and then it will turn out that the basis proposed as justifying equal moral considerability is too flimsy or insubstantial to do this justifying work.3 In this article, we will assume that not all human beings are moral equals. This is an assumption, not an assertion, on our part. It is motivated partly by the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph, and partly by the nature of the present inquiry: to wit, examining what, if anything, relational egalitarianism implies when it comes to relationships between moral unequals. Must moral unequals relate as moral equals?4 Or as unequals? Or in some third way? We will show that relational egalitarianism has much to say about such relationships. And we will show that what it has to say is plausible. Before proceeding, we need to defend our line of inquiry in view of the following skeptical challenge. For its supporters, what grounds relational egalitarianism is the fact—so they claim—that people are moral equals. For instance, this seems to be what the following passage from Kolodny implies: "Insofar as we are to have ongoing social relations with other moral equals, we have reason to relate to them as social equals".5 Hence, to ask what relational egalitarians are committed to saying about social relations in a—in their view—hypothetical situation, where people are not moral equals, is to ask a moot question. It is like asking what a utilitarian is committed to, as regards the right thing to do, if welfare is not valuable. The question makes no sense, because the notion that welfare has value is built into, and therefore presupposed by, utilitarianism. Similarly, the notion that people are moral equals is presupposed by relational egalitarianism.6 While this challenge makes sense, we think that, ultimately, we are asking a perfectly justifiable question, and one we have the resources to answer. First, Kolodny's remark is most naturally taken to mean that moral equals must relate as social and political equals given that, more generally, the way people relate, socially and politically, should fit the way they relate in terms of moral status. If this is correct, Kolodny's view is underpinned by a general commitment to some kind of fittingness; and this general commitment, surely, has implications for the question of how moral unequals should relate, even if Kolodny thinks that people are not moral unequals, and thus even if the implications in question do not materialize in the real world.7 Admittedly, as a matter of logic, one can consistently hold both that if people are moral equals, that justifies certain claims about how they should relate socially and politically and that if they are moral unequals, that does not justify any claims about how they should relate socially and politically. However, such a view seems arbitrary. Why would moral status have implications for how we ought to relate only in cases where people's moral statuses are equal? So the view is not especially plausible. This implausibility is reflected in the complaint: "They treated us as if we were animals". The complaint assumes, precisely, that people and non-human animals do not enjoy the same high moral status, and that the bad treatment complained about would have been justified (or at least less unjustified) had there been a difference in the moral status of the wrongdoers and the victims of the sort that exists between people and non-human animals. Second, for reasons brought out in our first response, we believe the analogy with utilitarianism is misleading. Consider a utilitarian who believes that morality requires us to do what realizes the greatest amount of value, and who treats welfare, understood as preference satisfaction, as the only value. Surely, utilitarians of this kind are committed to a view about what morality requires agents to do if what is of value is not welfare as preference satisfaction, but, say, that people's level of welfare match their level of moral desert (as Kant thought would be ideal). That is, they are committed to the view that, morally, we should act so as to maximize the overall fit between levels of welfare and levels of moral desert. [E]ven those who do deny the existence of desert may find our investigation of some interest. For even if they are convinced that desert would only exist if this or that metaphysical condition is met, and even if they believe that the requisite conditions are not, in fact, met, presumably they are themselves open to the possibility that their favored metaphysical views on the relevant issues might be somehow mistaken. Thus it seems epistemically possible, if nothing more, that desert claims might turn out to be legitimate after all. Accordingly, there may be some value in getting clear about the nature of desert—what it would be like, if only it were real—even if one is skeptical about whether anyone really does deserve anything.8 Similarly, in the light of forceful challenges such as those put forward by Arneson, McMahan, and Singer, relational egalitarians should be open to the possibility that people are not moral equals. They should recognize the value of exploring what, if anything, their view commits them to, as regards how we should relate socially and politically, if they are mistaken and not all human beings are moral equals. Exploring the issue of how moral unequals are required to relate in the relational egalitarian framework is important for several reasons. First, it helps to develop relational egalitarianism as a theory of justice—a theory which still leaves many questions unanswered, because it is relatively young. As we will show, our discussion helps to shed light on the place of children and non-human animals—individuals that are arguably not moral equals of persons—in relational egalitarianism. Second, the exploration will show that relational egalitarian objections to paradigmatic relational inequalities—such as discrimination, racism, and sexism—can be constructed, even if not all human beings are moral equals. That means that the plausibility of relational egalitarianism does not stand or fall with the idea that all humans are moral equals.9 This result is important, given the dilemma Arneson describes above. Third, the exploration illuminates the important point that relational egalitarianism is a large family of theories that differ along many different dimensions, including their responses to the question of how moral unequals should relate. The article is structured as follows. In Section II, we introduce relational egalitarianism and distinguish two forms: deontic and telic relational egalitarianism. We further distinguish two accounts of deontic relational egalitarianism and explain that these provide different accounts of how moral unequals should relate. We show, moreover, that the least demanding conception of deontic relational egalitarianism provides plausible answers to the question of how moral unequals should relate.10 In Section III, we turn to telic relational egalitarianism. We show that the reasons proposed by relational egalitarians explaining why inegalitarian relationships are bad and egalitarian relationships are good apply to relationships between moral unequals as well: these reasons are not tied to people with equal moral status. We explore further implications of these arguments in Section IV in relation to the place of children and non-human animals in relational egalitarianism—something about which relational egalitarians have not said much. We provide a relational egalitarian explanation of why adult-adult paternalism may be regarded as more objectionable than parent–child paternalism. Additionally, we respond to a concern which may arise when the claims of people who are moral unequals are being discussed. Section V concludes and presents the main takeaway point of the article: that, fortunately, our commitment to relational, social, and political equality is not hostage to the philosophical discussion about whether all people are moral equals. The relational egalitarian theory of justice requires people to relate as equals.11 It has received much attention in recent years as a result of relational egalitarians' trenchant criticisms of distributive theories of justice. On these theories, justice is ultimately a matter of distributions.12 Distributive theorists, relational egalitarians argue, fail to see that, ultimately, justice is not about distributions. A given distribution in a society may accord with distributivist requirements of justice, but still not realize justice because, for example, racism and sexism are prevalent in the society. What ultimately matters with justice is, instead, whether relations are suitably egalitarian. Justice requires that people relate to each other as equals.13 For X and Y to relate as equals, relational egalitarians argue, they must (1) regard each other as equals; and (2) treat each other as equals.14 Derek Parfit famously distinguished between telic and deontic egalitarianism. According to the first, "it is in itself bad if some people are worse off than others".15 This is an axiological view. According to the second, "it is not in itself bad if some people are worse off than others … What is unjust, and therefore bad, is not strictly the state of affairs, but the way in which it was produced".16 Whereas in telic egalitarianism, inequality is bad, in deontic egalitarianism, inequality is unjust.17 These views are different. To see why, imagine a case in which an inequality is unavoidable. Thus, suppose the inequality was created by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake. Since, in this case, the inequality has not come about through anyone's wrongdoing, it is not unjust on the deontic view. According to the telic view, on the other hand, the inequality is in itself bad even though it is unavoidable.18 Telic Relational Egalitarianism. It is, in itself, good (bad) if egalitarian (inegalitarian) relationships between people exist. Deontic Relational Egalitarianism. It is morally required that people relate as equals, not unequals. So, telic relational egalitarianism says it is (dis)valuable that people relate as (un)equals, whereas deontic relational egalitarianism says that people ought to (not) relate as (un)equals. Lippert-Rasmussen refers to Christian Schemmel and Elizabeth Anderson as examples of deontic relational egalitarians.20 Anderson says that "[Relational] egalitarians base claims to social and political equality on the fact of universal moral equality".21 Schemmel says, "the objection to [inegalitarian] relationships is not merely that they are, in some sense, bad for people, but that they constitute unjust treatment".22 Telic relational egalitarians include Martin O'Neill, who says, "The existence of these kinds of social relations [egalitarian social relations] should itself be seen as intrinsically valuable, independent of the positive effects that such relations may have for individual welfare."23 Narrow Deontic Relational Egalitarianism. Moral equals must relate as moral equals. To relate as moral equals has to do with interests and agency. If we are to relate as moral equals, our interests must be given equal weight and our agency must be equally respected—in a fundamental sense for both.25 If X treats Y in a racist manner, X treats Y's interests as if they are less important, in a fundamental sense, than the interests of non-Y people. X and Y thereby fail to relate as moral equals, and that is unjust on narrow deontic relational egalitarianism. Broad Deontic Relational Egalitarianism. Moral equals must relate as moral equals and (many) moral unequals must relate as moral equals.26 Of course, it is not enough merely to claim that moral unequals, or some, or many of them, must relate as moral equals. We also need an explanation of why moral unequals, despite being moral unequals, must relate as moral equals. Perhaps the justification for narrow deontic relational egalitarianism can also be used to show why, as broad deontic relational egalitarianism prescribes, moral unequals must relate as moral equals. Lippert-Rasmussen offers an explanation of why moral equals must relate as moral equals with reference to fairness.27 On his interpretation of fairness, "it is unfair if people are differently situated if the fact that they are differently situated does not reflect their differential exercise of responsibility".28 This explanation of why moral equals must relate as moral equals looks promising. It certainly seems unfair, and therefore unjust, for a black person to be treated in a racist manner by a white person given that they are moral equals.29 But can fairness also explain why moral unequals must relate as moral equals? Can we say that it is unfair if moral unequals, or some, or many of them, relate as moral unequals? identify available courses of action she might take, discern reasons for and against the options, weigh and assess the reasons she discerns, deliberate and make choices, carry out the action chosen, and do all this not simply for a single decision problem at a time but with respect to long-term plans of action and projects she might undertake.32 These cognitive and volitional abilities come in degrees. To be a rational agent is to possess them at a certain given level. On this account of moral status, moral unequals possess rational agency to different degrees. Now, let us suppose that both X and Y have moral status, but that X has higher moral status than Y in virtue of possessing rational agency capacity to a higher degree. One fairness-based argument for the view that it is unjust if X and Y relate as moral unequals runs as follows. Suppose X's possession of a higher degree of the capacity for rational agency than Y is due to nature and nurture—for example, X is bright, and their parents have raised them in a way that has been conducive to their achieving a high level of rational agency. In this case, the differences in the capacity for rational agency between X and Y are not due to their differential exercise of responsibility. Thus, if Y relates as an inferior to X because X has the higher moral status, the fact that X is differently situated (for example, in that Y should treat X's interests as more important than their own in a fundamental sense) does not reflect X's and Y's differential exercise of responsibility. And since being differently situated when this does not reflect differential exercise of responsibility is unfair, it is unjust that X and Y relate as moral unequals despite their being moral unequals. A significant challenge to this argument is that it only goes through if X and Y's differing capacities for rational agency are not due to their differing exercises of responsibility.33 This is a challenge, because it seems highly likely that the abilities constituting the capacity for rational agency can be affected by the exercise of responsibility. For instance, one of the components of rational agency is the ability to "deliberate and make choices". It seems reasonable to assume that the more one deliberates, the better one becomes at deliberating. If X decides to devote a considerable amount of their time to deliberating and Y does not because they would rather do something else, we may expect that, over time, X will become better than Y at deliberating and making choices.34 And if that is the case, and all else is equal, X will at that point have a greater capacity for rational agency than Y, and thus, at least on some views, higher moral status than Y. In this case, their possession of unequal degrees of the capacity for rational agency is a result of X and Y's differential exercise of responsibility. So, it would be unfair if they were not differently situated: that is, if they did not relate as moral unequals. It follows that fairness can ground broad deontic relational egalitarianism only if we assume that human beings are not responsible for their degree of the capacity for rational agency (and, more generally, are not responsible for their full or partial possession of the property, or properties, grounding moral status). If they are so responsible—which they seem to be, at least to some degree—it would be unfair for moral unequals to relate as moral equals. Deontic Relational Justice. Moral equals must relate as moral equals, and moral unequals, assuming they have sufficient moral standing, must relate as moral sufficients. This account of deontic relational egalitarianism is not egalitarian "all the way down", in the sense that it denies that moral unequals must relate as moral equals. We therefore refer to it as deontic relational justice. But it is still egalitarian in the sense that moral equals must, as relational egalitarians prescribe, relate as moral equals. When it comes to moral unequals, the account only applies to entities with sufficient moral standing.35 It does not say anything about, say, rocks, assuming they have no moral standing at all. The account does not say, for instance, that a human being and a rock must relate as moral sufficients. But where entities with sufficient, but unequal, moral standing are concerned, the account says that they must relate as moral sufficients.36 The Egalitarian Deliberative Constraint (EDC). If you and I have an egalitarian relationship, then I have a standing disposition to treat your strong interests as playing just as significant a role as mine in constraining our decisions and influencing what we will do. And you have a reciprocal disposition with regard to my interests. In addition, both of us normally act on these dispositions. This means that each of our equally important interests constrains our joint decisions to the same extent.38 If, in a marriage, one party's interests always trump the other's, the parties fail to relate as moral equals. If they are moral equals, this is unjust. Moral unequals, on the other hand, do not have to grant each other's interests the same weight in their collective decisions. Arguably, to relate as moral sufficients, the marital parties do not have to satisfy the Egalitarian Deliberative Constraint in their dealings with each other. It suffices that they have a standing disposition to treat each other's interests as playing a role which is somehow fitting given their relative moral statuses.39 But it is a long way from acknowledging this to saying that "anything goes, morally speaking". Importantly, by adopting deontic relational justice, relational egalitarians will be able to object to most of the types of relational inequality to which they would want to object, even if some human beings are moral unequals. As Lippert-Rasmussen posits, the possession of "'sufficient moral standing' means that there is, in some sense, a sufficient number of sufficiently important things that one cannot do, morally speaking, to that individual and which this individual is permitted to do."40 Arguably, two of the sufficiently important things one cannot do to individuals with sufficient moral standing are discriminate against or dominate them. Suppose a two-year-old child and one of her parents are not moral equals, but they both have sufficient moral standing.41 We take it that we would find the relational inequality which would result from the parent treating the child in a sexist manner objectionable, because the parent thereby fails to treat the child as a being with sufficient moral standing (we would reach the same verdict, we take it, in cases of domination and racism as well). Similarly, if a normally functioning adult treats a person with Down syndrome in a sexist manner, they fail to treat them as a human being with sufficient moral standing. We can imagine cases where the gap in moral standing between two human beings is even smaller. Suppose an adult, Bert, has a very slightly higher moral standing than another adult, Carl. If Bert discriminates against Carl, it is hard to see how he could be treating Carl as a being with sufficient moral standing. Importantly, these ways of treating others—discrimination, domination, racist and sexist treatment—are paradigmatic relational inequalities.42 This shows that even if human beings are moral unequals,43 relational egalitarians, by adopting deontic relational justice, are not barred from objecting to paradigmatic relational inequalities.44 At this point, one might have a serious concern about our exploration of the idea that, even if people are moral sufficients, the standard relational egalitarian objection to paradigmatic relational inequalities stands. In explaining the importance of this article's main question—how should people relate, according to relational egalitarianism, if they are not moral equals?—we noted that, in the philosophical literature, there are forceful challenges to the notion of basic moral equality, citing among other things Arneson's continuity question: if moral status results from rational capacities, why is the moral status of people not a scalar matter in such a way that those with greater rational capacities have greater moral status? The concern is that at least some of these challenges also cast doubt on the threshold notion of moral sufficients, and motivate a continuous, graduated view of individual moral status instead.45 In response, we note, first, that this concern is not about the truth of our main claim (that even if we are not moral equals, we should, from the perspective of relational egalitarianism, relate as sufficients), but its importance. We are not arguing that people are moral sufficients (or moral incommensurables). We are arguing that if they are, it remains the case that they should not relate in the inegalitarian ways (for example, involving discrimination or domination) that relational egalitarians think moral equals should avoid. This can be true, even if the continuity challenge gives us good reason to think that people are not moral sufficients. Second, and much more importantly, we think the present challenge suggests we should extend the scope of our robustness claim beyond people being moral sufficients or moral incommensurables. Suppose moral status is very much a scalar thing, and that people therefore vary in their moral status beyond the variation involved in the claim that they, or most of them, are moral sufficients. Even so, it will still be the case that discrimination and domination—the sorts of inegalitarian relations that relational egalitarians object to—are wrong when they occur in relations between moral unequals—at least, it will be, if those with inferior moral status have sufficiently high status (which might simply be some moral status). Even if animals, say, have lower moral status than human beings, it is still wrong to dominate them; and even if children have lower moral standing than adults, it is wrong to treat a child in a sexist manner. In claiming this, we do not have to assume that the wrongness of domination and discrimination is a binary, as opposed to a scalar, matter—that there are no degrees of their wrongness. It may be that discrimination is worse when the person subjected to it has higher moral standing than when the sufferer has lower standing, other things being equal. But this is compatible with discrimination still being wrong when directed at an individual with a lower moral standing. If that is correct, the present challenge points in the direction of an even more ambitious, and for that reason even more interesting, claim than the main claim regarding robustness that we defend in this article. In this section, we have explored what deontic relational egalitarianism implies in situations involving moral unequals. Broad deontic relational egalitarianism prescribes that moral unequals must relate as moral equals. We saw that fairness can explain why that is so if, and to the extent that, people are not responsible for the property, or properties, grounding moral status. Deontic relational justice avoids relying on this assumption by prescribing that moral unequals, assuming they have sufficient moral standing, must relate as moral sufficients. If X and Y relate as moral sufficients, there are ways in which they must not treat each other: for example, neither can treat the other in a racist or sexist way.46 This shows that relational egalitarians, by adopting deontic relational justice, put themselves in a position to object to discrimination, domination, racism, and sexism even if human beings are not moral equals (at least, as long as the involved parties have a sufficient moral standing). Telic Relational Egalitarianism. It is, in itself, good (bad) if egalitarian (inegalitarian) relationships between people exist.47 We will explore two questions: (1) is it bad if moral unequals relate as moral unequals? (2) is it good if moral unequals relate as moral equals? In answering these questions, we propose to look at the reasons relational egalitarians have provided for holding that inegalitarian relationships are bad and egalitarian relationships are good. We will explore whether these reasons read across successfully to relationships between moral unequals. Two caveats: first, we devote more space to the reasons why inegalitarian relationships are bad than we do to the reasons why egalitarian ones are good. This is not because we believe the latter are unimportant—they clearly are important. It is because we wish to investigate whether the reasons that relational egalitarians have themselves given to explain the value implications of (in)egalitarian relationships tell us anything about relationships between moral unequals. It so happens that these reasons have tended to be constructed around the idea that inegalitarian relationships are bad, rather than the idea that egalitarian relationships are good. Second, relational egalitarians have argued that relational inequality is intrinsically bad in various ways. It might be suggested that, at most, they have shown relational inequality to be reliably instrumentally bad: that is, bad not in itself, but in virtue of its effects, and that, accordingly, the arguments do not amount to sound arguments in favor of telic relational egalitarianism.48 In response, we note first that (as we occasionally indicate below) we share the suspicion manifested in this response. However, we shall refrain from going deeper into this matter, since ultimately it pertains not to whether inegalitarian relations are bad, but rather to the way in which, according to relational egalitarians, they are so. Our main concern is to ask whether the reasons proposed by relational egalitarians themselves for thinking that inegalitarian relationships between moral equals are intrinsically bad apply to inegalitarian relationships between moral unequals as well. It is not to examine whether relational egalitarians are correct in seeing (at least many of) their arguments as arguments for telic egalitarianism (though we suspect they are not), as opposed to arguments for unequal relations being bad in virtue of their consequences. With these caveats entered, we turn to examine the specific reasons relational egalitarians have given for holding that unequal relationships are (as they believe, intrinsically) bad. Do these reasons read across to relationships between moral unequals? T. M. Scanlon has claimed that inegalitarian relationships are bad because "it is an evil for people to be treated as inferior, or made to feel inferior".49 He explains that this is an evil because it leads to stigmatizing differences in status, with "damage to individuals' sense of self-worth".50 In a racist society, the inequality between a black person and a white person may lead the former to devalue their self-worth.51 Is it only an evil for a person to be treated as inferior, or made to feel inferior, in a way which leads to damage to that person's self-worth if the people involved are moral equals? It seems not. Suppose that Higher and Lower are moral unequals: Higher has higher moral standing than Lower, although Lower still has sufficient moral standing. Suppose now that they relate as moral unequals—for example, they both regard Higher's agency as more important than Lower's agency, and they both treat it as such. Even if that were so, the inegalitarian relationship could still lead Lower to devalue their self-worth more than they should given their differences in moral status.52 Suppose Lower undervalues their self-worth relative to their moral standing. Suppose, further, that they do so to the extent that they believe their own interests have no importance at all in decisions about their and Higher's collective affairs. Lower comes to feel excessively inferior, morally speaking. In this kind of case, inegalitarian relationships between moral unequals are bad, because they lead the morally inferior individuals to de